What I Learned by Doing Capitalism

Event Video

The Innovation Economy begins with discovery and culminates in speculation. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error and error and error: upstream exercises in research and invention, and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Each of these activities necessarily generates much waste along the way: dead-end research programs, useless inventions and failed commercial ventures. In between, the innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy, from canals to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment. And so at each stage the Innovation Economy depends on sources of funding that are decoupled from concern for economic return: financial speculation and the state.

Speaker

Bill Janeway, US Venture Capitalist and Economist

William H. Janeway is Senior Advisor at Warburg Pincus. Dr. Janeway is a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council and the board of governors of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.